Definition of Employee Empowerment
Employee empowerment is allowing employees to own a certain level of responsibility and freedom to make decisions that are related to their jobs in the organization. By doing so, even the employees at the lower level of the organization will be able to make certain decisions that will positively affect the organization. This will help employees to gain more knowledge and enhance their decision making skills to propose solutions for the problems being faced by the organization.
Advantages to Employee Empowerment
Employee empowerment brings about so many benefits like increased productivity, increased organizational responsiveness to issues, and increased commitment level in the employees. It also leads the employees to the next level of commitment, since they can also own a certain amount of contribution in the decisions made towards achieving the glorified aspirations of the organization.
Disadvantages to Employee Empowerment
Despite a lot of benefits, there are also downsides to Employee Empowerment. Efficiency may decrease due to inconsistency in decision making, and may not be favorable for achieving the goals of any organization. Another disadvantage is coordination, since the decisions are scattered and no longer made at the top alone, it becomes hard to organize these decisions. It could also cause a strain in the relationship between the Manager and the employee because there is now only a thin line of authority separating them. Finally, some observations have shown that employee empowerment can be counterproductive and may even give management more control over the employees. For example, in case of teamwork, some employees may start to bow to peer pressure, which could pose another problem.
Empowerment provides a worker with intrinsic rewards.
Principally, Empowerment offers a worker with intrinsic rewards by letting them to make certain decisions on their own and see the success that follows. This in turn leads the employees associate their success with their own competences, inspiring them to continue to strive for higher levels of productivity in imminent tasks.
Supervisors can promote organizational success by engaging employees to be innovative in their ideas and decisions whereas at the same time allowing them to see it through to implementation. Empowerment allows subordinates to work autonomously as they control their own jobs by using their own knowledge, skill-sets, capabilities and decision-making skills to achieve personal and organizational success.
Supporting the Empowerment of Others
There are various ways of empowering employees, and each of them differs in field and scope. In the end, no matter the method used, empowerment often results in job satisfaction and an increase in motivation. For this reason, managers always source for different methods to keep their staff empowered to propel them towards achieving success both in the organization and personally.
Firstly, a good manager should be able to act in a way that allows, the employees know that they are valuable to the organization. By involving employees in the decision-making process and by encouraging them to share in the vision of the organization, the manager is showing the employees that their contribution is equally important to the organization. For this to be effective, the manager has to trust the employees enough to allow them to make decisions themselves.
THE LAST WORD
Employee empowerment, no matter the form or degree, often brings about job satisfaction and increase in motivation. Having empowered employees is the dream of every leader. Therefore, managers should try their best to find ways to keep their employees empowered so that they can be successful, both in the organization and personally.
REFERENCE
www.managementskillsadvisor.com / The business of employee empowerment: democracy and ideology in the work place, Thomas A. Potterfield, Green Wood Publishing Group, 1999.
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